I was reading that when horizontally polarized light hits a vertical Polaroid all the light is blocked out. But when the Polaroid is off the vertical, some but not all photons "decide" to jump into ...

I am trying to design an experiment where I can calculate the distance at which polarization will not have a measurable effect on a neutral object, from a sphere charged by a Van Der Graaf generator. ...

Suppose you have some sort of a "black box" system - you know nothing of its inner workings. The system has two outputs, let's call them A and B, and it occasionally emits photons - one photon from ...

I want to check if I correctly understand polarization.
Considering a single photon travelling in vacuum, it can only be polarized linearly under the same direction at any time, right?
When we talk ...

I thought that modern 3d glasses work by having one lens filter horizontally polarized light, and the other filter vertically polarized light.
However, I found this pair of 3d glasses at my parents' ...

Assume having a laser beam which is horizontal linear polarized. As one measure the sqrt(intensity) transmitted through a rotatable linear polarizer its pattern corresponds to a cosine. Plotting this ...

Well, we know that circularly/elliptically polarized light is made up from orthogonal components. So is it possible then to create circularly/elliptically polarized light by combining horizontally and ...

This has been bugging me a bit since the BICEP announcement, but if there are any resources that answer my question in a simple way, they've been buried in a slew of over-technical or over-popularized ...

When unpolarized light is polarized with two polarizers, the intensity becomes $I=I_ocos^2(θ)$ (Malus's law). But when unpolarized light is polarized with only one polarizer, the intensity is reduced ...

I find magneto-optical effects fascinating, and especially the Faraday effect. But most sources only give a phenomenological description, while I want a deeper explanation of its mechanism. Is there a ...

I have a polarized light (lets say p polarized) which happens to undergo scattering when it is obstructed by a rough opaque dielectric material. What will happen to polarization? Will some part of it ...

This is a question that has been troubling me from many days:
Suppose we pass a linearly polarized light through a system of 3 successive polarizers.
The 1st polarizer is offset 30$^{\circ}$ from the ...

Since a polarization of the wave is described by complex numbers, we can try to give that mathematical formalism geometrical meaning. With having two different axes, one imaginary and other real, it ...

Total Internal Reflection causes phase change of a light beam. I searched for effect on a polarized light beam by Total Internal Reflection but could not find much. I am assuming polarization does not ...

So, this is probably incredibly foolish, outlandish, etc but I figure I'd post it anyways. Basically I was thinking about how the Deuterium nuclei repel each other and how they do this by exchanging ...

I am wondering how to describe the collapse of a photon state when it is measured in the polarization degree of freedom (say by a filter which let pass just one particular polarisation).
Let the free ...

The imprint of gravitational waves created shortly after the big bang may offer direct evidence for inflation theory, according to a discovery by the BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole and released ...